American Indian Murder, Inc.

Readers of the New York Times magazine on April 25, 2014 might have been surprised at a story by Eric Konigsberg on the 1976 murder of Anna Aquash. The article of nearly 5,500 words came headlined “Who Killed Anna Mae?” and the answer solves the question why it took nearly forty years for such a piece to appear.

Konigsberg, a former reporter for the New York Times and author of Blood Relation, explains that a South Dakota rancher found the badly decomposed body of a woman who had been shot at close range through the back of the head. The victim was Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a key player in the American Indian Movement, a “radical” group of Native American militants founded in 1968, the same year as the Black Panthers, “the movement’s model.”

Konigsberg is right about that but after all this time many readers may be as unfamiliar with these groups as they are with Anna Aquash. The Black Panthers and AIM both saw America as intrinsically oppressive and racist, with racism part and parcel of government, the military and law enforcement. Both movements demonized a “white” American governing establishment and saw revolutionary violence and separatism as the only path to change.

“These white people think this country belongs to them,” Anna Aquash once wrote. She was a Mikmaq Indian from Canada who came south to join with AIM and fight the “raggedy-ass pilgrims” who took the land from the Indians back in the day. In 1973 at Wounded Knee, where the US Cavalry killed 200 Indians in 1890, AIM took up arms in a 10-week standoff with the National Guard, the U.S. Marshals Service and the FBI. There at Wounded Knee Anna Aquash met Dennis Banks, along with Russell Means AIM’s most high-profile leader.

Aquash was having an affair with Banks when he was still involved in a common-law marriage with Darlene “Kamook” Nichols. That did not sit well with some movement women of different tribal affiliations, and they saw the affair as a threat to AIM’s stability. At the same time, Konigsberg notes AIM had become “a vortex of paranoia” with factions charging that some members were “pigs” and collaborators.

As Konigsberg has it, Aquash was aware that some thought she was a turncoat. When she and Nichols were jailed, Aquash said she feared for her life. When Aquash was swiftly released on bail, some saw that as evidence of collaboration. Then in 1976 she turned up dead, shot through the back of the head. As this piece shows, it was some time before the case landed in court.

For AIM she was another “lost soldier” in the ongoing war against an oppressive, white racist government. The party line was that the FBI had set up the murder of Aquash to scare and destabilize AIM, but in his investigations Konigsberg found otherwise. Over the last decade, he wrote, “several teams of state and federal attorneys in South Dakota have established that her killing was in fact an inside job, orchestrated by AIM members who believed she was working as an FBI informer.”

Konigsberg finds no evidence that Aquash was an FBI snitch but makes a convincing case that AIM ordered the hit. The story jostles with characters like Marlon Brando and Leonard Peltier, now in prison for killing two FBI agents. The narrative also explains the reluctance to explore murders by militant radicals on the left. As Konigsberg shows, the nation was busy romanticizing and protecting the AIM leaders.

Dennis Banks and Russell Means were “telegenic spokesmen in traditional braids, buckskin fringe and cowboy boots.” They would publish memoirs, appear in Hollywood films such as The Last of the Mohicans, and find themselves showcased on college campuses. As Konigsberg recalls, Andy Warhol rendered a portrait of Means and the Los Angeles Times dubbed Means and Banks “the two most famous Indians since Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.”

Dennis Banks was acquitted of charges over Wounded Knee but convicted of riot and assault over a courthouse gun battle at Custer, South Dakota. Rather than serve time, Banks fled to California. There Governor Jerry Brown refused to extradite him. Banks took full advantage of the protection by studying at UC Davis, teaching at Stanford, and serving as chancellor of Deganawidah-Quetzecoatl University (DQU), a ramshackle outfit near Sacramento.

In 1983, after the election of governor George Deukmejian, Banks fled to a reservation in New York. The intrepid Konigsberg recently tracked him down at his A-frame in Minnesota. The writer asked Banks if he would have advocated killing AIM traitors? He said might not participate directly ““But I would say, ‘Take care of this.’ Or, ‘Take the guy out, and I don’t want to see him again.’”

Further, Banks said, “There are no secrets and questions left. If there’s a burning house, no one gives an order to put out the fire. Someone just goes and does it. It was people who fell into an idea.” That “idea” would be revolutionary violence in the style of the Black Panthers, AIM’s model as Konigsberg explains.

The Black Panther Party for Self Defense emerged in 1966 as a revolutionary movement led by Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver (Soul on Ice). The Panthers duly became an icon the sixties counterculture but those who defended the group neglected their victims, such as Betty Van Patter.

David Horowitz hired Van Patter to keep the books for the Educational Opportunities Corp., which ran a school for children of the Black Panthers. Betty Van Patter soon disappeared and “by the time the police fished her battered body out of San Francisco Bay in January 1975, I knew that her killers were the Panthers themselves.” Horowitz subsequently discovered that “the Panthers had killed more than a dozen people in the course of conducting extortion, prostitution and drug rackets in the Oakland ghetto. While these criminal activities were taking place, the group enjoyed the support of the American left, the Democratic Party.” As he notes, in 1970 Hillary Rodham Clinton helped organize demonstrations to stop the trial of Black Panther leaders “who had tortured and then executed a black youth named Alex Rackley.” His crime? The Panthers suspected he was an informer.

The AIM vanguard was about the same thing but politicians, filmmakers and journalists still miss the significance. That’s why the authorities decline to pursue murder cases involving sixties radicals and why articles about their victims are so hard to find. And that’s why the story of AIM murder victim Anna Aquash took so long to appear in the New York Times magazine.

In bygone eras, groups like the Black Panthers , Weather Underground, and AIM would have been dealt with brutally and without mercy. As far as I am concerned, they got away with their crimes.

I would say that Anna Aquash was a what one could call a “foolish victim”, by inserting herself into a dangerous situation to participate in a “crusade” and wound up getting herself destroyed as a result.

Drakken

She got what she deserved, just like a lot of Indians in MN and ND,SD did when they thought they were going to take on the pale faces, they thought wrong.

nomoretraitors

“wound up getting herself destroyed as a result”
And the world is a better place for it

truebearing

The Left didn’t invent hate, racial or otherwise, but they created an organism that detects it, feeds it, and enables it to grow, then enslaves it to their power agenda. That is why they are now enabling Islam.

Myrtle Linder

And fertilizes it generously, they love to see it flourish, and attack the i conservatives, as long as they don’t get caught in the cross fire.

antioli

The Media did not fail to report on the crimes;they refused to.

Turtle Heart

This article is factually incorrect continuously. First of all, the national guard was never involved at wounded knee. They loaned a single FBI unit an old personal carrier and stop. The comparison to the Black panthers is nonsense. This article is written as an article about and article about something that happened a long time ago and is fact free.

UCSPanther

Doesn’t change the fact that a woman is dead and evidence overwhelmingly lays it at the feet of the AIM communists…

Turtle Heart

1.No one is ever going to pardon peltier. He is right where he should be. 2. AIM clearly murdered AM Aquash. 3. Facts are always important. This article about an article has almost none beyond the obvious. Trash journalism does no one any service, on either side.

nomoretraitors

It certainly opened my eyes as to the true nature of AIM and Dennis Banks. I used to sympathize with him.

waldemar daninsky

Why didn’t Clinton pardon Peltier?

James Simon

Not to take away from Konigsberg’s efforts, but Native journalist Paul DeMain and the Trimbach’s book, American Indian Mafia (2009), have already exposed AIM’s dirty little secrets, and with considerable accuracy and detail. Until now, the main stream press has virtually ignored, and in some cases, helped cover up the truth about Dennis Banks’ involvement in the murder of Anna Mae Aquash, Leonard Peltier’s BS story about being the victim when he slaughtered two FBI agents, and the secret murders at Wounded Knee, 1973. Perhaps now the rest of the media, including the AIM-doting Native press, will play catch up. Perhaps they should begin by expounding on Trimbach’s dismantling of Peter Matthiessen’s, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse and the videos at americanindianmafia.com. Time for another round of 180-degree wiki-pedia corrections.

EphesiansSixTwelve

RE: Leonard Peltier & Doug Durham

“In the summer of 1988 during a conversation with Sheriff Lee Edmisten of Madison County, Montana the sheriff leaned over and in a secretive tone of voice asked, “You know Durham? What do you know about the ballistic reports… you know, the killing of the FBI agents at Pine Ridge?”

“What was Edmisten talking about? I knew nothing about FBI agents being killed and certainly had no idea what Pine Ridge had to do with
John Durham. As the realization of what Edmisten was talking about sunk in, he said: “Ballistic reports show it was Durham’s gun that killed the agents. Durham did it.”

“I had never said anything to anyone about any ballistics
reports so Edmisten’s comment was a shock. In reality, Edmisten was talking about Doug Durham, not John. My first question to Sheriff Edmisten was to ask where he got his information, he replied, “Someone told me,” refusing to answer the question. Less than one month later during a visit to Edmisten’s home in Sheridan, Montana
he told me he had received the information from FBI Agent Gary Lincoln.” ~Barry Clausen

The law enforcement community scared Bill Clinton off of pardoning Leonard Peltier, but Obama will do it.

Seek

Russell Means actually ran for president as a Libertarian back in 1988. Ron Paul eventually got the nomination, but Means was a legit candidate. I say this because the LP is on the Right. One can’t simply use this case as a pretext to launch an indictment of the Left.

trapper

All down the Leftist memory hole. As a soldier in the 1960’s I participated in suppressing “riots”, i.e. armed insurrection, in Detroit. That, too, plus other urban “riots” is whitewashed from history with Leftist brushes.

mackykam

Eldridge Cleaver, the most articulate of the Panther vanguard, said in his last televised interview that “if people had listened to Huey Newton and me in the 1960s, there would have been a holocaust in this country.”
Maybe it would have thinned the ranks of the black ghetto herd. The rest would have been grateful to remain alive and become productive members of American society instead of welfare leeches spending their time looking for new baby daddies and making up names for their next litter.

nomoretraitors

Interesting piece but it leaves out an important point from the NYT story: the unsolved killing of Ray Robinson, a black civil rights volunteer who joined up with AIM at Wounded Knee. Where is the NAACP on this?

cacslewisfan

Hippies = The Worst Generation

redd

They didn’t just kill her. They held her for days, repeatedly raped her, and beat her so bad that her front teeth were knocked out. Oh, I forgot the name of the guy who ran the Indian legal office there but the murderers left Aquash tied up in the car while they ran inside and talked to the lawyer. He’s claiming atty client privilege but I hold the atty complicit in her death, too.